Criminal Culpability in Prescription Drug Deaths

Report on Psychotropic Drug Crimes Launched on Online Tracking Database

 SAINT LOUIS: Two U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration investigations into doctors who prescribed cocktails of drugs, including tranquilizers and painkillers, leading to patient deaths, have prompted a new report released today online. The report, “When Prescribing Psychotropic Drugs Becomes Criminal Negligence: Cases and Convictions”, published by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), shows legal precedents where psychiatrists or doctors prescribing psychiatric drugs have been convicted of manslaughter when patients have died as a result of those prescriptions.

 

Published on the website, psychcrime.org, which features the world’s only searchable database of criminally convicted psychiatrists and mental health practitioners, the report calls for referral for criminal investigation of all deaths or injury due to poly-pharmacy or negligent prescribing—rather than to medical boards who can only suspend the license of those found culpable.

 

A case in point is the once prominent Arlington County, Virginia psychiatrist Martin H. Stein. On January 31, Stein lost his five-year effort to regain his medical license when the Virginia Board of Medicine declared him unfit to resume practice. In 2000, Stein’s 48-year-old patient Anita Kratzke died after Stein prescribed her 12 different drugs. No autopsy was performed, but Stein wrote on the death certificate “cardiac arrest” without examining the body. Two years later, in 2002, Stein surrendered his license after the Virginia Board of Medicine ruled that he was a danger to public health and that signing the death certificate without proper investigation was part of a pattern of negligence. The 22-page order from the board describes ethical violations, misdiagnoses and the inappropriate / excessive prescribing of drugs, in the treatment of 10 patients Stein saw between 1991 and 2000. The board also found that Stein “engaged in sexually intimate behavior” for more than two years with a patient he billed for accompanying him on shopping sprees and another incident where an adolescent was given 33 prescriptions. Despite the severity of these acts, Stein was never criminally charged. Jan Eastgate, President of CCHR, says the lack of accountability is astounding, “Cases like these should be referred for criminal investigation instead of a slap on the wrist, particularly when deaths are involved.”

 

The unique psychcrime.org database is searchable by first and last name, type of crime and location. In its nearly 40 years of investigating criminal abuse in the mental health system, CCHR has found that criminal convictions do not always stop practitioners from moving to another state or country and continuing to practice on unsuspecting patients. CCHR has tracked such cases and reported them to local authorities that have been able to locate them and prevent further patient abuse. The database provides a list of almost 1,000 convicted mental health workers. Recent cases include:

 

• On February 1, 2008, Pennsylvania psychiatrist Harold Pascal pleaded no contest to charges of issuing illegal medical prescriptions and Medicaid fraud. He was sentenced to 6-18 months in jail. Narcotics Agent Troy Serfass, who posed undercover as one of Pascal’s patients said, “He was motivated by greed. He prescribed illegal medications even after being told patients were selling those medications on the streets.”

 

• On October 24, 2007, psychiatrist Michael Mavroidis of Massachusetts was sentenced to a year in prison, 10 years probation and ordered to pay a $10,000 fine for illegally prescribing drugs, including the sedatives Klonopin, Ativan and Xanax and the painkiller Oxycontin. He came under investigation following patient overdose deaths and accusations that he extorted oral sex from at least one patient in exchange for prescription drugs.

 

Pending cases include Christian Hageseth, a psychiatrist registered to practice in Colorado, who prescribed 90 capsules of fluoxetine, an antidepressant, over the Internet to John McKay, a 19-year-old student at Stanford University in California, who subsequently committed suicide. Toxicology tests confirmed alcohol and fluoxetine in McKay’s bloodstream. In 2004, the FDA warned that antidepressants could cause suicidal thoughts and actions in children and adolescents and recently increased the warning to age 24. In 1998, the American Psychiatric Association expelled Hageseth and his Colorado medical license was revoked for a relationship with a patient who later became his wife. After his license was reinstated on a probationary basis, he began authorizing prescriptions for an online pharmacy. Hageseth was extradited to California to face trial for practicing without a license in the state of California.

 

“CCHR is dedicated to exposing these crimes for the protection of consumers and invites authorities and the public to make use of this unique database,” Ms. Eastgate stated.

 

CCHR is an international psychiatric watchdog group co-founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights.  Contact CCHR St. Louis at 314-727-8307 or email cchrstl@cchrstl.org.